sirk123au / imcat

Show any image in a terminal window.

imcat

Preview any size image in a terminal window.

Platform

Supports Linux, MacOS and Microsoft Windows 10 terminals.

Introduction

Do you ever find yourself logged into a server, over SSH, but there is no X11 connection. And you want to see the contents of an image?

imcat to the rescue!

imcat is a 24-bit image viewer that uses ANSI terminal colours to display any image supported by STB. It automatically resizes to the width of your terminal, using proper sampling kernels.

imcat also works on the latest version of Windows 10.

Usage

$ imcat file1 [file2 .. fileN]

If you want to blend the image with the terminal background, then you need to specify the background color of your terminal. For instance:

$ export IMCATBG="#dad9cc"

Todo

• Handle alpha-transparency. Requires reading the terminal background colour, somehow. Tricky.

Done

• Correct for aspect ratio of terminal font.

Building

Unix

On Linux, just use 'make' to build the imcat binary.

Windows 10

On Windows, you need clang.exe from Visual Studio 2017 to build the imcat.exe binary. It's actually quite hard to get that compiler working, so you may just as well grab the pre-built imcat.exe binary.

License

• CC0

Authors

Bram Stolk.

stb_image.h is by Sean Barrett et al.

Acknowledgements

A shout out to Frogtoss for the idea and help. Thanks!

Gallery